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How DEX Benefits IT & Security Operations: 5 Top Use Cases

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 12:58:49 Z

I was recently explaining the importance of digital employee experience (DEX) management to a consultant who is a self-described "digital nomad" and works from wherever he pleases. The connection to DEX may not have entirely been clear, until I explained that his ability to easily do his work remotely using online tools exemplifies what good DEX is all about in the era of Everywhere Work.

Improving DEX delivers benefits for IT efficiency, employee productivity and retention, unified endpoint management (UEM) and even cybersecurity. Based on our work in implementing digital employee experience management over the years, here are five top use cases we've seen where improving DEX can drive benefits for IT and security operations.

Enable discovery and visibility for your IT estate

The first use case we should explore when it comes to digital employee experience management is enabling discovery and visibility. It might not seem like it's related to DEX management. But it's essential for delivering quality digital experiences.

Unless you can discover and transparently monitor all the devices, assets and connections that are part of your IT estate, you're never going to be able to maximize DEX or reap other benefits, such as remediating vulnerabilities or delivering effective UEM. It comes down to this: to improve digital experiences being delivered via digital endpoints, you need to know what and where your endpoints are.

In our own research, we found that 31% of IT professionals were still using spreadsheets to track IT assets. When COVID-19 hit, IT departments were forced into a fast pivot to enable remote work. They took whatever measures they could to cope with the new work paradigm forced on them by the pandemic. This also meant providing the devices and tools employees needed to work from anywhere.

But afterward, many organizations throttled back on post-COVID IT spending. And now the challenge is how to best rein all this back in and gain control over your IT estate. One customer in the travel industry implemented an endpoint management solution because they needed to know what's actually going on in my environment? How many remote devices do I have? Where are they? Where are they connecting from? Where are they accessing information? Who's doing it?

They'd been relying on spreadsheets to track IT assets, but they knew that was unsustainable for a business with any significant number of distributed devices and apps. I've found that customers who adopt a solution that automates identification of all the assets on their network are nearly always surprised — sometimes shocked — at the results.

One transportation provider using our discovery solution was amazed to find there were 30% more devices on their network than they had expected.

There can be serious, costly conconsequences from not knowing all the assets on your network. For instance, an IT infrastructure's "ghost assets" can create a scary variety of compliance risks. Those can range from regulatory issues to inadvertently violating vendor contracts. Or maybe there's a networked fish tank thermometer somewhere that will let hackers breach your casino.

One transportation provider found it had 30% more devices on its network than expected.

Reduce the burden on your IT team

"Can you help me retrieve my password?" That's one of the most mundane — and common — requests to devour the time of an IT helpdesk. Only 34% of IT organizations have automated more than half of their network provisioning and change management tasks, meaning that a tremendous amount of IT tasks are still done manually. This is obviously a big drain on their time and a major expense for the organization. Plus, it drags them away from more strategic, high-value work.

What can lift this burden off their shoulders? A digital employee experience management platform that employs intelligent data collection and analysis with automated remediation. The root causes of the most common user experience issues can be automatically identified and resolved rapidly.

However, Ivanti's 2023 DEX Report finds that only a limited number of organizations are looking into self-healing technology to proactively solve IT issues. This frees administrators for more important work. Better yet, this improves the job satisfaction and morale of your IT team. They're spending less time firefighting, more time focused on more interesting and strategic projects.

Optimize device and app management

The average business user employs 2.6 connected devices during their workday. This gives them flexibility while creating challenges for IT teams. At many companies, those teams must support a minimum of four different operating environments — Windows, macOS, iOS and Android — to serve all employees. Each has its own unique configurations, applications, services and security protocols.

The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) is only making this more of a challenge. This means IT departments will absolutely need to automate as much of the monitoring and management of their device estate as possible to protect DEX, because when a device fails, doesn't integrate properly or isn't up to date, it drags down the user experience and stalls productivity. It's also why it's vital to deploy a digital employee experience management platform to help optimize user experiences across all those devices.

Kingston University in London realized that they were seeing battery failures on certain devices. They used endpoint management to monitor battery lifecycles and set thresholds so that when a battery was nearing end-of-life, a process was automatically triggered to send the user a replacement.

It's a case where proactively heading off a potential issue for a user before it affects them improves DEX.

How can you get outstanding DEX while improving IT operations?

Enhance security and compliance

How does adoption of a digital employee experience platform to improve DEX enhance security? The connection is obvious, when you consider it: when security measures are automated and don't interfere with employees' workaday activities, many compliance headaches simply vanish.

An Harvard Business Review survey found 67% of employees said they’d failed to fully adhere to cybersecurity policies at least once.

For example, by automatically installing a security patch on a remote device, you avoid the chance an employee might neglect a manual update. Patching will be smarter, faster and more efficient because your system will automatically prioritize vulnerabilities. Responsible DEX solutions reduce friction when workers need to access business resources, too.

Digital employee experience management should be able to spot potential IT and security issues before they impact the organization. It should also make recommendations on actions to remediate them and improve DEX. This way, problems get headed off before they even reach the proverbial pass.

Another benefit of automating these processes? Reducing the overall costs of security and compliance. This is attractive at a time when compliance managers are predicting higher costs, with nine of 10 respondents to an Accenture survey saying they expected "evolving business, regulatory, and customer demands to increase both their compliance-related and compliance operating costs by up to 30%" over 2023–24.

Streamline costs

Procurement is always a time-consuming and resource-intensive task for IT teams. Whether they're acquiring new devices, retiring older ones or trying to gauge whether they should sunset applications, it's a process where they're constantly dealing with a deluge of tasks like new user onboarding, license renewals and more.

A digital employee experience management solution that uses conversational AI and collaboration tools can solicit real-time, interactive feedback from users to track DEX and device/application performance.

This data can provide great guidance for answering key questions like, which devices or apps are being used most productively? What licenses are really being used, and which ones should we let expire? Is somebody requesting a device that we might reallocate instead of buying new hardware and software?

This way, an organization can optimize its hardware and software procurement budget while elevating DEX by supplying employees with the most appropriate and effective tools available.

Investing in digital employee experience (DEX) presents a powerful opportunity for IT to become a true strategic partner across the entire organization. Find out how to advocate for DEX in IT by checking out the fireside chat video below.

How Better DEX Benefits People + Performance: 3 Key Use Cases

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 14:00:00 Z

Adopting a digital employee experience (DEX) solution delivers benefits for everyone in an organization, from the C-suite on down.

A DEX solution provides contextual insights and intelligent automation capabilities that allow an IT team to proactively detect and resolve security vulnerabilities and other IT issues. This improves IT operations and an organization's cybersecurity and compliance posture. Just as importantly, a DEX solution can improve work culture, employee engagement and performance, enhancing an enterprise's resilience and competitiveness.

Before I go through the use cases that support DEX adoption, let's look at just some of the problems that arise with a poor digital employee experience.

The dangers of bad DEX

Knowledge workers who use digital technology to perform job tasks face an endpoint management challenge an average of 919 times per year, or approximately 3.67 problems per business day. Moreover, whenever a user is distracted from a job task, it can take them up to 20 minutes to re-focus on the work at hand even after an issue has gotten fixed. All of this can have a domino effect on their performance and that of their teammates.

A high frequency of employee experience issues also hinders the performance of IT administrators. About 40% of employees reach out to the helpdesk each week to resolve digital problems. Some of those issues are minor but so repetitive they become excessively time-consuming for IT staff, driving up IT costs and reducing productivity.

And if employees seek help from their peers instead of experts, they may unintentionally worsen a problem and obscure the root cause. This can drive an endless loop of recurring issues.

So how can a digital employee experience solution help solve these problems? Here are key use cases where I've seen it can drive major improvements.

Poor DEX can contribute to digital burnout and disengagement, poor performance and workforce attrition.

Remediate IT issues before they impact performance

When Forrester examined the real-world ROI a company could see from using our endpoint management software, it found one area where there were significant gains was by deploying automated self-healing to detect and remediate DEX issues.

A digital employee experience solution with self-healing capabilities enables automatic remediation of endpoint issues without manual IT involvement, so all endpoints can run without disruption. The 2022 commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study found a three-year benefit of over $560,000 for organizations that deployed such a self-healing environment.

As one interviewee for the study explained:

By doing some of the self-healing — updating old profiles, rebooting computers if they haven’t rebooted in seven days, patching in the evening — that work has helped our end users become more productive because the computers are getting back some of the resources that were being hogged up before…There is a financial benefit to the end-user side because of every minute they are able to save.

The benefit to IT helpdesks? Automating the resolution of these issues (even before users realize they exist!) frees IT from having to address them.

Boost employee engagement and retention

I'm particularly passionate about talent retention because it's so critical to business success, and it's really linked to DEX.

Post-pandemic, 45% of employees told us they're facing more technical issues than before COVID. 49% of knowledge workers felt the digital tools and environment provided by their organization were frustrating, and 65% believed they would be more productive with better technology at their disposal.

Additionally, a quarter of them felt a lack of suitable tech to be a contributing reason for quitting their jobs. These figures are even higher among IT teams and the C-suite. Even so, 30% of IT leaders have no process or metrics at all in place for evaluating DEX, and 38% still rely on HR engagement surveys.

This lack of visibility into DEX is bad news, since good DEX supports employee engagement, which is vital to business productivity and profitability:

Employees who are not engaged or who are actively disengaged cost the global economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity in 2022, according to Gallup.
Recent data found 45% of US employees were looking for a better position elsewhere, and almost 23% of US employees left their jobs in 2022.
Even before the "Great Resignation," Gallup estimated poor retention was costing US companies $1 trillion per year.

Just 21% of IT leaders consider the end user experience to be the main priority when selecting new tech tools.

This is where a digital employee experience solution becomes essential. That's because it automates the process of gathering employee usage data and feedback so an organization can accurately assess its own DEX performance.

With contextual visibility into its digital environment in real time, it can capture intel and insights and focus on the most important DEX KPIs. Constantly gathering this data and analyzing it helps IT leaders quickly identify potential DEX issues. This allows you to calculate and eventually elevate the most important metric of all — your DEX score.

It's taken some time, but I've encountered more situations recently where IT departments are being brought into conversations with other teams, including Human Resources, to discuss the value of DEX in employee retention. HR and IT may be siloed on DEX issues, and there's an opportunity for synergy and collaboration to improve employee engagement and retention. More and more organizations are testifying about those benefits.

Another benefit? Better employee experiences can result in better customer experiences, which can have ripple effects on sales and profitability.

Let's also not forget how the tools used to improve DEX and HR service delivery can also make life easier for overburdened HR teams, too!

Foster cross-functional collaboration

Another sign of how companies recognize the need to improve employee experience is the growing number of senior management roles focused on employee experiences — whether called chief employee experience officers, chief workplace experience officers or even chief happiness officers.

Part of that job is about elevating DEX, because that solves a range of problems for the entire organization. We've already touched on how a digital employee experience solution can help with employee satisfaction and retention, benefiting HR. But better DEX drives other improvements for multiple departments and disciplines across an organization

At a recent Gartner IT Symposium, Chris Goettl, Ivanti’s Vice President of Product Management, discussed how to use technologies like this to reduce the friction between IT and corporate security teams. They often don’t speak the same language or gather the same data, but there are overlaps and they should be on the same page: They’re both interested in standardizing and automating processes, proactively detecting issues and remediating them before they affect the organization.

Live Webinar: Shattering Silos: Practical Ways to Align Security and IT

A digital employee experience solution that can detect potential IT and security issues and make immediate remediation recommendations helps both these teams succeed in unison.

In another example, a digital employee experience solution can improve the job of the procurement team by giving visibility into what devices or apps are being productively used by workers — and which aren't. This informs decision-making about license renewals, hardware and software purchases, cloud services consumption and budgeting.

A digital employee experience solution is indispensible

Boosting DEX by adopting a digital employee experience solution drives across-the-board benefits, not only operationally but for cybersecurity. It also supplies the kind of seamless, from-everywhere work environment that employees find more satisfying and that some research indicates has made them more productive.

As Andrew Hewitt, principal analyst at Forrester sums it up in a 2023 blog post:

So while DEX may seem like a “nice-to-have,” it’s an absolute must, especially when degraded employee experiences negatively impact customer and business outcomes.

In today's business landscape, it's imperative to hold onto talented employees while maximizing their productivity, and a best-in-class DEX solution is key to making that happen.

City of Seattle: Adding ITAM to Its ITSM Platform Improves Service Delivery While Optimizing Assets

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 12:00:01 Z

Anyone thinking about embarking on the journey to extend their IT Service Management (ITSM) with IT Asset Management (ITAM) should have a sit-down with Jenny Rock from the City of Seattle.

A 27-year technology veteran who began her career in the telecommunications industry, Jenny has been with the City of Seattle for 15 years — the last four as Product Engineer in what is now known as the Collaboration and Workplace Technologies division. She’s part of the service management operation, working with the Ivanti^® Neurons for ITSM and ITAM solutions.

The Backstory

The City of Seattle sits on Puget Sound in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and is the largest city in the state of Washington, supporting a population of more than 750,000. As a city, Seattle is known as a progressive leader in technology, innovation and the environment.

The City of Seattle was tasked to consolidate its several IT departments into one department which it called ‘Seattle IT’. Previously, separate teams supported the technology needs of many individual city departments such as power and utilities, transportation services, parks and recreation, courts, police, fire, facilities management, and more — around 50 departments in all. This distributed model resulted in a lot of duplication of processes and effort across the board.

The greatest challenge Seattle IT faced was the lack of standard, shared, day-to-day repeatable processes and a better way to discover and track assets. The separate IT teams had their own processes and data repositories.

Previously, as Jenny explained, there were occasional efforts to take physical inventory and somehow track assets, but it was difficult to execute and data was difficult to maintain with the disparate existing systems in place, which led to a lack of ownership and accountability at all levels.

The Pain that Drove the Effort to Modernize

Ultimately, it was apparent Seattle IT needed to standardize and mature its processes to be more efficient.

“We were struggling with maintaining a record of licenses, entitlements, warranties and vendors,” Jenny said. “What’s more, we were overpaying for licenses we didn’t need and for software that had been installed — in some cases multiple times for the same users. As such, we needed a way to better track these assets.”

Some of the key drivers that led Seattle IT’s Service Management organization to extend its Ivanti Neurons for ITSM solution and add on ITAM included:

Transparency for all stakeholders regardless of their interest, from auditors to the departments who pay for IT services and ultimately to the taxpayers of the City.
The need to solve key pain points around IT contract management, software license management, warranty tracking and migrating more asset types into the database.
A demand for improved process automation and greater integration between ITSM and ITAM.
The need to deprecate a legacy solution used to manage and track inventory of all types, from consumables to capital assets.

Bringing Order and Process

One of the first efforts was to start building out the Enterprise Application CI as a repository to gather as much data as possible from all the consolidated IT departments. Jenny and team were able to consolidate two or three other application repositories, numerous spreadsheets and some Access databases.

Since then, the team has been promoting Service Management across the many city departments, implementing ITIL best practices and keeping pace with the changes resulting from the ever-evolving IT consolidation.

“With Ivanti, we’re now bringing all of our assets into a modernized ITSM interface and will be setting up actions, rules and processes for managing our inventory,” Jenny said. “This will provide us with a more accurate overview of what assets we have and what we are paying for in terms of software licensing.”

Leveraging ITSM Processes and Full Asset Lifecycle Management

Today Seattle IT leverages ITSM processes across many of its operations. Key areas the Seattle IT Service Management organization handles include:

Service Catalog Management
Service Level Management
Incident and Request Fulfillment
Change Management
Knowledge Management
Service Asset and Configuration Management
Problem Management
Process Evaluations

According to Jenny, tracking assets in their ITAM repository with Ivanti will enable full asset lifecycle management and improved use of discovery tools to link assets with each other as well as with users, departments and locations.

“The opportunities with this new solution are endless. We’ll also be able to see how much we spend each year to maintain our technology solutions and determine if we need to adopt cloud-based solutions, for example, in place of an on-premises solution to save money.”

When physical inventories are taken, it’s much easier for teams to find assets and verify information for them. This also helps internal Service Management teams work together more closely, because workflow and processes provide a clearer picture of what’s expected for any given request or incident.

Progress by the Numbers

Already, Seattle IT’s Service Management organization has loaded 42,200 city records in the Workstation CMDB, powered by Ivanti Neurons for ITSM and ITAM solution. The CMDB consists of about 17,000 items in surplus or pending surplus, and about 21,000 deployed items, with the remainder in other various states — in stock, being prepped or staged for deployment, with the vendor for repair, etc. This includes user devices, training room equipment, testing machines, shared devices and loaner stock.

Jenny said that within Ivanti Neurons for ITSM, there are 26,000 employee records, more than 15,000 of which are active, including contractors, temporary employees, and interns. And given the movement of personnel in and out of the city government and the shift to remote work, the team’s CMDB devices have a lot of movement as well. “For example, we have about 7,900 laptop computers, 2,000 tablets and 12,000 desktop/specialty workstations in use,” she added.

One of the most important fields added in this effort was the “Custodian” field, which is required when the asset isn’t deployed to an owner or isn’t designated as surplus.

“This meant that if your name was on it, you’d better know where it was and be able to produce it at any point you’re asked to,” Jenny said. “Device support and deployment teams soon learned the benefits of having the data in one place and the accountability it provided. Everyone is now responsible for the data, and no one wants to be the custodian of something they can’t prove they have.”

Jenny and the Service Management organization are now in the process of expanding the Ivanti deployment to include servers, databases, infrastructure devices, communications devices and has seen departmental interest in using it for traffic devices or other IoT devices.

“We are also looking at tracking software licenses, entitlements, warranties and contracts, and this will be added into our overall processes where previously they were all managed as individual processes,” she said.

The Two Greatest Advantages of Adding ITAM to ITSM

According to Jenny, efficiency and accountability are the two greatest advantages of adding ITAM to its ITSM platform. “With these advantages will come not only monetary and budgetary benefits but goodwill from our customers. We charge our IT services back to the departments we serve, so while we’re able to provide them detail of what they’re being charged for. Previously it was a bit fractured in terms of how it was delivered.”

She concluded, “To be able to pull this detail from one system moving forward will help our department be much more transparent to our customers AND make it easier for them to request assets. Overall, our goal is to minimize both losses and inefficient processes.”

You can listen to the full interview with Jenny Rock from City of Seattle here:

The Business Value of Integrating ITAM with ITSM

Mon, 17 May 2021 15:32:01 Z

As organizations experience increasing complexity and expanding perimeters, IT professionals are looking to get a better understanding into their distributed software and hardware assets. IT teams need immediate access to detailed information in context of services and underlying assets they run on to make more intelligent decisions about their IT investments. Having asset visibility at their fingertips enables them to maximize cost savings, secure assets, and improve the employee experience. In doing so, they align digital infrastructure with their business needs.

IT asset management, or ITAM, enables greater control over IT landscapes, and optimizes asset lifecycle management. Organizations are able to more quickly and easily manage costs, and improve agility and compliance.

ITAM starts with knowing what you have within your IT estate. As enterprise perimeters expand with multi-clouds, the everywhere workforce, and IoT, managing digital assets and their costs grows more complicated and expensive.

Visibility of digital assets improves help desk services

Without question, ITAM and ITSM are more effective when integrated. If you already use ITSM, but still use spreadsheets to track assets, integrating ITAM will make help desk staff and system admins more effective and improve the employee experience. By better understanding the lifecycle of enterprise-wide assets, and having the information easily consumed within an intuitive dashboard and in context of the service, they can make better service delivery and management decisions.

ITAM enables proactive service management by identifying, classifying and managing assets, no matter their location. Service desk personnel need detailed information about their user’s software and hardware. The information needs to be instantly available, so they can better support their users. With asset information at their fingertips, greater insights will be at their disposal to help resolve issues with efficiency and speed. ITAM helps service desk personnel identify trouble ticket patterns developing within specific software versions and hardware models. They can instantly see the product’s warranty status, so they can effectively guide the user.

Integrating ITAM helps improve IT service management operations and outcomes:

Service desk personnel need detailed information about hardware and software to understand the root causes behind the issues. ITAM can assist by quickly identifying and helping resolve conflicts related to unauthorized software that causes operational issues.
When users request new assets, it’s important to understand what they already have. ITAM helps the service desk avoid overprovisioning and overspending. It also prevents incompatibility issues, when new software is known to conflict with certain OS’s or applications.
Detailed information about the assets helps automate self-service capabilities. This is particularly true for role-based IT profiles. A new application request can be compared to the assets already installed on the user’s device, verified against approved software for their role, and automatically installed.

Leveraging spend intelligence

Integrating ITAM with IT service management helps save time and resources, lowers costs, and improves the utilization of IT assets. Research has shown that on average, organizations have 12 or more discovery and inventory tools. It’s no wonder IT spends an average of 10 hours per week resolving data-accuracy issues.

Clear visibility of IT assets, services, security posture, and processes leads to better IT insights, and therefore, better business outcomes. It lays the foundation for properly managing, securing, and optimizing your IT estate. According to the survey linked above, 43% of organizations still use spreadsheets to track their assets, 50% use endpoint management solutions, and 45% use inventory tools. These siloed products generate siloed service desk activities that take too much time and effort to identify, associate, correlate, and solve issues. ITAM uses a single dashboard view that correlates your entire asset inventory, to provide optimal service to customers.

Improving the digital experience

The challenges of expanding asset locations with work from anywhere users, clouds, and IoT devices, have never been so impactful. The swift and unprecedented changes we’ve experienced in the work environment have created avoidable security risks and preventable cost inflation. Detailed and accurate information of all assets is required for an agile enterprise, enabling flexibility for employees and apps delivered and supported from anywhere. IT teams need visibility that shows context. They require policies that dictate how assets are managed, deployed and used.

Enterprises are going through a digital transformation journey to improve business operations. However, no matter what stage they’re in, many still track their assets manually. ITAM is fundamental to a mature digital transformation. The advantages and use cases for ITAM abound, beginning with the enormous benefit of eliminating the manual effort of finding and keeping information up to date within spreadsheets. ITAM can help reduce the time required to understand contract positions and prepare renewals from weeks to minutes. Knowing where and what your assets are enables you to secure them and ensure software patches are current.

Complete visibility provides clarity and enables your service desk to act more decisively. Enterprises can improve the user experience, while ensuring IT will be even more productive and effective. The fusion of ITAM and ITSM significantly improves the IT organization’s ability to improve service quality and customer satisfaction. The end result is increased efficiency, a reduction in costs and risks, and overall improved effectiveness.

Service the Everywhere Workplace

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 15:00:01 Z

Drive outcomes with insights

What if you could give employees reliably great experiences while improving outcomes across your organization? You’ve got it with Enterprise Service Management from Ivanti. It arms you with insights and actions that let you dramatically reduce resolution times and give you more time for the cool stuff you love to do.

Add value to your assets

Ivanti’s Enterprise Service Management delivers visibility across your entire asset portfolio, enabling you to optimize asset performance and value over entire lifecycles. No more lost, unknown or risk-prone assets. No more buying what you already have. The result: more efficient and secure IT, and more business value from your Ivanti investment.

Superpower your productivity

Turbocharge your IT and other departments with the power to resolve issues quickly and automatically, even before employees notice. Start delivering the great experience employees expect and love and drive the IT transformation you've wanted.

Empower everyone

Great service management starts with IT but reaches all across your organization, giving users the benefit of more productive, personalized and enjoyable connected experiences everywhere.

Ivanti Neurons for Discovery: The Single Source of Truth in Minutes, Not Days

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 22:28:53 Z

Who doesn’t like a good ole’ game of “Guess how many M&Ms or marbles are in that jar”? Are you off by 20, 50, or by a couple hundred? Or maybe you’re fairly close estimating the number of spheres in a confined space. Now think about your IT assets in your organization. Are all of them accounted for? Where are they located? Take a guess. Guess again. A miss is as good as a mile.

Keeping track of all your IT assets, understanding what hardware and software is used, and keeping them protected is not an easy feat. Now add on the next layer of complexity with more remote devices and edge devices accessing your network. Employees working anytime, connecting from anywhere, requiring contextual awareness to provide better overall experiences.

There’s no way to manually keep up with the device proliferation and real-time changes. You need a way of quickly scanning and tracking what’s connecting to your network to keep your environment secure, compliant, and cost efficient.

What if you could have accurate and actionable visibility of all your IT assets in minutes? Well, let me introduce you to Ivanti Neurons for Discovery.

1. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery: Find Everything

An IT staffing company once told me about an asset that was stuck in a cabinet behind a box of Oreo cookies. Right, not sure how Oreo cookies can last that long. Definitely not in my household. Or another example, an organization was still accounting for assets that were no longer with the company—decommissioned, lost, or never returned. Would you be OK with former employees still holding onto your hardware and accessing corporate information? Wouldn’t you want to know when new or unknown devices join your network?

With Ivanti Neurons for Discovery, you can say goodbye to your tracking spreadsheets once and for all, and to those ghost cookies…I mean ghost assets. It discovers devices quickly in real time on any network segment.

You might say you already have multiple discovery solutions in your organization. How is this one different? Ivanti Neurons for Discovery uses passive and active discovery to find all managed or unmanaged devices. It detects network-connected devices in real time, even if they’re behind a firewall. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery scans your network without requiring you to install agents on all devices on your network. Think of it as your neighborhood watch program with an assigned representative and not consuming your bandwidth. Always on, always working for you. If something is there, even for a moment, you'll catch it and inventory what's on it.

2. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery: Aggregate Information

A transportation company was sure they captured everything they had. When we then conducted a discovery scan, we found 30% more devices than their endpoint solution and Active Directory showed them. They were sure their environment was properly protected, but how do you secure devices you don’t even know about?

With Ivanti Neurons for Discovery, once a device is discovered, the in-depth inventory service interrogates each IP-connected device or service to learn everything it can, including information about the network connection, hardware details, manufacturer, and what software is running on the device. When under management, inventory will also provide software-usage information to help you manage your software assets efficiently. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery “connects the dots” and aggregates accurate asset information from multiple data sources. Ongoing discovery scans ensure you are aware of any new or unknown devices that join your network.

3. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery: Augment Data

A university was tracking their IT assets with spreadsheets and another department managed their contracts repository. They didn’t proactively manage end-of-life dates or warranties and often spent time fixing devices that were still under warranty. In our “Aligning ITSM and ITAM Processes Survey”, we found that half of the respondents admitted to sometimes fixing devices that later were discovered to still be under warranty, resulting in time and money lost.

In this same study, 20% of respondents admitted not having the insights into which assets were out of date, and 28% reported spending hours per week supporting out-of-warranty and out-of-support-policy assets. With Ivanti Neurons for Discovery, you can augment your data from third-party systems using connectors to B2B data like hardware warranty information, vendor licensing rules, or purchasing information from resellers. With this enriched asset data, you can optimize purchases, warranties, contract data, and end-of-life cycles as needed so your service and IT teams have everything they need to log an issue against an asset and get it resolved quickly and accurately.

4. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery: Make Sense of Data

Analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates found that on average, IT spends 10 hours per week resolving data-accuracy issues. That’s a quarter of a person year at minimum that I’m sure you can find other use for. For many, it’s taking a lot of time as data can be in so many different places—in their procurement system, in IT endpoint and network management systems, in contract repositories, in spreadsheets, and more.

It’s tough to normalize the data, reconcile it, and make sure you understand the delta, and where the data is coming from. Good tools can automate this process for you, to give you robust data you can work with.

Ivanti Neurons for Discovery fully automates normalization and reconciliation processes to clean up your data and reduce the number of names used to describe the same thing. Convert all your asset data to have a standard name, mapping structure, and classification.

Ivanti Neurons for Discovery helps you reduce the time spent on aggregating and harmonizing asset data from weeks down to minutes. No more cross-referencing and manual reconciliation activity among devices that interact with every system in your IT estate. The output helps you identify devices that are missing and unaccounted for, and that pose significant security risks. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery provides accurate asset information leading to improved cost efficiency through better utilization of existing assets and improves your security posture.

5. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery: Provide Actionable Insights

Asset Discovery and inventory capabilities are foundational to effective endpoint, asset, service, and security management. To efficiently assist your end users and remediate issues quickly, you need to have all the necessary asset data in context at your fingertips. We asked 1,600 survey respondents if service management processes and request workflows have automatic visibility into asset information and relationships. According to the findings, 43% reported “sometimes,” but more than one third of respondents don’t have any visibility into this information.

Ivanti Neurons for Discovery provides turnkey discovery functionality to easily populate configuration management (CMDB) and asset management databases. Our customers report that it only takes them minutes to populate the CMDB with insightful data that helps them provide service in context with asset information to make informed decisions. When service and asset processes and data are closely aligned with accurate data in the CMDB, many activities and processes become more automated, efficient, and responsive, leading to better outcomes and better service experiences.

Try It Out Today

With Ivanti Neurons for Discovery, you have complete asset visibility and are equipped to optimize your asset value and improve your security posture. No more tracking spreadsheets and no more ghost assets. Ivanti Neurons for Discovery provides you with that single source of truth in minutes not days, for accurate and actionable insights. So, stop guessing, eat your M&Ms, and let Ivanti Neurons for Discovery take care of your asset-discovery needs.

5 Reasons Why IT Asset Management Is Key to Your Business

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 23:14:31 Z

The holiday season is always a good time to slow down, meditate, and be grateful for family, friends, and the blessings you have in your life. And believe it or not, I think this is a good practice to do in IT as well.

You’re fighting the good fight day after day, extinguishing fires, battling resource and budget constraints, and dealing with more than enough on your Christmas dinner plate. Before you add any more sides to your already-full meal, take a step back, a deep breath, and take it all in. Think about what you have available to you, and how you can truly maximize and optimize what you have.

Ivanti Asset Manager: Free Demo

And don’t worry, you don’t have to look at each of your assets and determine whether they spark joy or not. Ask yourself this instead: Can I improve the performance of my existing assets to get the most out of my asset investments and boost user productivity? However you answer that question, let’s examine five reasons why you should consider taking a closer look at your IT Asset Management (ITAM) practice.

1. Visibility – Know what you have

Close your eyes—inhale, exhale, and imagine where all your assets are. Do you have 100% visibility into all your software, hardware, and users in your organization? Don’t worry if you don’t have full visibility yet. That’s where an ITAM solution helps.

Instead of keeping up with endless spreadsheets manually, simply guessing what you have, or relying solely on Active Directory, ITAM will help you see what assets you have, where they are physically located, and how they are used, even down to the associated cost center or department level. This is a critical first step as many organizations underestimate what they have. When you first start out with ITAM, it’s not uncommon to find 20-30% more devices than you think you have. That’s 30% more of things you didn’t know you had, you didn’t secure, and you don’t know where or how it’s being used. Don’t give yourself holiday heartburn, let ITAM do the work for you.

Don’t rely on guessing games or spreadsheets; gain complete visibility to maximize the performance and value of your hardware and software assets.

2. Security – Protect what you have

Now that you‘ve achieved IT estate nirvana, you can now master taming your beast of an IT landscape, where unauthorized or unknown IT assets are introducing significant security risks to your environment. Having a clear picture of the hardware you have and what software is running on it is key to help you secure your IT systems and data against the most pervasive cyberattacks. And, the Center for Internet Security (CIS) thinks so, too.

When you fully understand what is connected to your network, you can put checks in place to verify that assets are compliant with your security policies. With ITAM, you can also be notified when an asset doesn’t report into your network for a period of time, allowing you to investigate missing assets that have been stolen or lost and are now posing a threat to your environment or data.

Ensure everything is accounted for; track your IT assets properly to lower the security risks from unknown, lost, or misconfigured hardware and software.

3. Lifecycle Management – Manage what you have

Seasons change, and so do your IT assets. You might have all the information about your assets when you first purchase them, but what happens to them within a month, a year, or even three years. Does your support organization have all the insights they need to properly service the user? Should a broken device be fixed or sent back for warranty repair?

With ITAM, you have a better understanding of the changes that occur throughout your asset lifecycles so you can make informed purchasing and replacement decisions. You can be notified when contracts are up for renewal, check their warranties, and decide what hardware model to best standardize on. This way your assets are performing at their best, which let’s your users do their best.

Manage your IT assets and contracts proactively; get insights about when to purchase, update, and maintain your IT assets in order to get the most out of your IT investments

4 .Cost Optimization – Maximize what you have

Doing more with less or the same. We’ve all heard that before. That still doesn’t stop your users requesting new software and hardware or, even worse, circumventing IT processes and deploying software or hardware with no regard to security policies, compliance regulations, or budget constraints. Unused or redundant software applications are not only costly but also increase security risks if not updated or patched properly.

ITAM provides you with the insights you need to reclaim software licenses and renegotiate vendor contracts to help you only pay for what you’re actually using. With ITAM, you are better equipped to control your users’ software and hardware requests and purchases and ensure maximum value out of your IT asset investments.

Avoid shelfware and redundant software purchases; get more value from your IT assets by only paying for what you use.

5. Shift left – Get even more out of what you have

Don’t stop there though, there is always room for improvement. Once you’ve reigned in your IT assets and have the insights to properly manage and optimize them on an ongoing basis, you can now provide the right insights to your service and support organization to better serve your users.

For instance, when you bring together your asset information with incident and problem management data, you can better assess why certain models of your devices regularly fail. This helps you proactively manage the overall risk versus trying to fix it as each device fails, and unifying those processes empowers you to avoid unnecessary costs and downtime overall.

Take advantage of automation and self-service; unify your ITSM and ITAM processes to improve IT service, enable users, and empower your business.

As you think about what to do differently in the coming year, get proactive about managing your IT assets. Take that first step and gain visibility into what you have. With clear insights into what assets you have, where they are, how much they’re costing you, and how they’re performing throughout their lifecycle from cradle to grave, you can get the most out of what you have and achieve significant efficiency and productivity gains.

Now go enjoy the holidays with your families, where you recharge and contemplate what you can do with the IT assets you have in your IT estate. And as a reminder for the new year and the new you with an effective ITAM practice, pin this infographic on your wall, mirror, or doorway. Happy holidays!

IT Asset Governance Improves Security Efforts

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 22:01:31 Z

Ok, I admit I kind of got sucked back into Fuller House recently. One line, cleverly addressing the missing cast of the show, is “It’s always open.” That’s something no IT security department ever said referring to their network, and I guess no one should leave their door unlocked in San Francisco either, but there’s that.

Data is the livelihood of business—trillions of data exchanges containing sensitive corporate information happening every second, all over the world. Data breaches are an ever-increasing danger.

In healthcare for example, the number of breached patient records has doubled, from 15 million throughout 2018 to 32 million between January and June 2019. Let that sink in. The first half of 2019 doubled the total of all breached patient records in 2018 according to the Protenus Breach Barometer.

Not surprisingly, the top source of data breaches is external attackers. The next most prevalent cause of compromised data records was accidental data loss—human mistakes. Former employees retaining full access to SaaS applications, rogue assets, unlicensed software, lost or stolen devices. Just a few examples of what IT and Security teams deal with on a regular basis.

Security Concerns Will Drive Half of ITAM Initiatives

According to Gartner, Inc., 50% of ITAM initiatives will be primarily driven by information security needs and concerns by 2022. (“Enabling the Management of IT Assets With a Comprehensive IT Asset Life Cycle;” Analyst Ryan Stefani; Gartner’s IT Sourcing, Procurement, Vendor & Asset Management Summit)

IT and security teams often struggle to identify all of the IT assets in their environment. Not an easy task given the dynamic nature of technologies such as devices on and off the network, mobile devices, and cloud instances. This lack of visibility widens the cyber exposure gap, increasing the chances of a business-disrupting cyber event.

In the past, the IT Asset Management (ITAM) discipline has been predominantly used to ensure license compliance. While this is still one of the primary drivers, ITAM is becoming a key focus area for security teams to fully understand what assets they really have, where they are located, how they are used, and what security risks they potentially represent.

Two-Thirds of IT Managers Don’t Have Completely Accurate IT-Asset Records

As reported in ComputerWeekly, 66% of IT managers admit to not having a completely accurate record of their IT assets. Many organizations still use spreadsheets for their management initiatives.

The process involved in assessing and patching vulnerabilities to protect against cyberthreats can be very sophisticated on the security side. However, to manage inventory, many organizations still rely on their manual spreadsheets, which means they still don’t really have a good handle on their inventory. An EY Report states that around 56% of organizations verify asset location only once a year, with 10 to 15% only every five years.

According to ISO standards, you can really only get to a level of optimization if you start with Level 1, Knowing What You Have, so you can manage it. Do you know all of the devices on your network? Are they all authorized, or do you have rogue devices? Is really EVERYTHING patched?

For proper vulnerability assessment, you need to have a proper baseline to understand what you truly have before you can manage and secure it. By tying together data systems for IT assets and security, you can arrive at this visibility and be able to apply business and security rules and automation to improve your cybersecurity resilience and gain efficiencies. Example? According to CIO digital magazine, each computer in every office around the world has about $259 of unnecessary, unwanted, or unused software on it on average. Each software license and hardware, whether used or not, represents a risk or vulnerability. If it’s not used, it should not remain in your environment.

When you get rid of unused assets, you can reduce your attack surface and reduce your security exposure. IT Asset Management governance addresses the assignments of rights and responsibilities for decisions regarding the investment, utilization, and divestiture of IT assets, with the objective of ensuring asset optimization, cost control, and risk mitigation. It’s critical for Security and IT teams alike.

How to Get Started

The National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) has published a Cyber Security Guide for ITAM. The publication was co-written with the National Cyber Security Centre of Excellence (NCCoE) and provides insight into what security professionals expect an asset management system to provide, and how they would go about configuring it. NIST believes that: “ITAM enhances visibility for security analysts, which leads to better asset utilization and security.” And NIST sees ITAM as “foundational to an effective cybersecurity strategy.”

IT Asset Management governance is a team effort. Align your asset teams closely with your security, procurement, and finance departments to define, establish, and monitor your asset lifecycle and security processes for best results. If your cross-functional team bases its processes, controls, and operations around the NIST frameworks, you now have a common framework to deliver against.

Ivanti Optimizer for SAP: How to Take Control of SAP Licensing

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 19:59:03 Z

The SAP® licensing model is complex. Without realizing it, you might be overpaying for your SAP® ERP, SAP® ECC or SAP® S/4 HANA licenses:

You might be overpaying for misclassified professional user licenses you don’t really need.
You might not have a clear overview of all indirect access users that are consuming SAP data by viewing reports in other applications.
You might be taking user licenses into account, without considering to optimize software engine licensing
And then there’s always the risk of still keeping dormant unused licenses around way too long and not reallocating these to new users

Whatever it may be, make sure you have a handle on your SAP licensing before having to submit your next annual SAP License Administration Workbench (SLAW) report to SAP.

UNDERSTAND YOUR SAP USAGE

Basing license classifications on granted authorizations, theoretical calculations, or organizational size, rather than actual usage, can lead to significant over licensing. That’s why it’s best to have a process in place to automatically optimize your SAP licensing and be well prepared for the next audit.

Ivanti Optimizer for SAP takes the guesswork out of license classification while delivering the deep insights SAP administrators need to prevent indirect access usage and unauthorized data consumption. Ivanti Optimizer for SAP provides you with the insight and intelligence to ensure you are correctly licensed based on actual usage, empowered to reduce liabilities from indirect access or misclassified users, and armed for your next contract negotiation and upcoming SAP audit.

OPTIMIZE YOUR SAP LICENSING COSTS AND BE READY FOR THAT NEXT SAP AUDIT

Part of Ivanti’s IT Asset Management solution portfolio, Ivanti Optimizer for SAP controls license management through intelligent insight which ensures organizations leverage the right SAP licenses based on actual usage. This provides valuable analysis during both contract negotiations and on-going license management to minimize license compliance risk, lower license costs and ensure audit readiness.

License Reclassification Based on Actual Usage. User usage insights and analysis ensure that SAP licenses are allocated based on actual usage, ensuring that the environment isn’t over licensed.
Identification of Unused and Duplicate Licenses. Built-in analysis pinpoints inactive and duplicate users, even across different systems and applications.
Minimization of Financial Risk Exposure from Indirect SAP Access. Alerts are immediately generated when indirect access usage is suspected, dramatically minimizing the risk of unauthorized data consumption and license contract breaches.
Up-to-the-Minute License Control. On-going license management control provides an accurate view into current SAP licensing classifications and assures license compliance and audit readiness.
SAP Engine Optimization. Assess SAP engine usage and gain insight into the best possible payment models which reflect real and current usage.

By providing a clear view of the current licensing and available licenses, organizations no longer need to pay for duplicates or unused licenses. Ivanti Optimizer for SAP reduces the cost of SAP licensing and maintenance costs, as well as, the manual efforts to prepare and execute license audits.

Robust Reporting across multiple SAP systems

In a multi-system, multi-environment organization, the question of “What is our current SAP licensing position?” can be very tricky to answer. To generate a rough SAP licensing report would entail mapping all existing SAP systems, receiving a SAP licensing report from each one, and mapping multiple user accounts to employees. With Ivanti Optimizer for SAP, this can be done in a matter of minutes. You can receive usage data and licensing data from each SAP application automatically and map SAP accounts from different SAP systems to employee records, understand the current situation and identify immediate saving potentials using combined views and best practices.

A CLEAR VIEW OF YOUR CURRENT LICENSE SITUATION WITHIN MINUTES OF IMPLEMENTATION

Get the insights you need to start licensing based on your actual utilization of the SAP system and reap immediate benefits from identifying inactive and duplicate users and tackling indirect access. Deployment of Ivanti Optimizer for SAP can be performed in days, for a rapid return on investment. And the best part? The solution is external to the SAP environment and doesn’t require any changes to the production SAP system.

FIVE simple ways to reduce your SAP License Spending:

Before you spend more on additional SAP licenses, check out five key tips for determining what your organization needs, how you can spend less, and where Ivanti Optimizer for SAP can help your whole organization to succeed. Tips include:

Combining users between SAP systems
Removing inactive or dormant users
Identifying indirect access before it's too late
And more!

Visit our Optimizer for SAP page for more information.

IT Fortunetellers: Ivanti’s Bold but Sensible IT Predictions for 2019 and Beyond

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 00:39:39 Z

We asked 10 of our most prominent IT experts to predict what IT looks like in 2019 and beyond. These predictions can help shape your IT department’s priorities and budgets for this year and the future.

In the first several months of 2019 these experts will provide some commentary and justifications for their predictions in blog posts and on webinars. Watch for those on Ivanti.com.

What do you predict will be the biggest IT trend in 2019 and beyond?

Our Essential ITAM Resolutions

When it comes to IT asset management (ITAM), the future is unified and automated. In 2019, consider these five areas in which improvements will help you globally mitigate risk, achieve compliance, scale your operations securely, and better control costs:

Visibility and Performance – Make sure you have a reliable discovery tool that can discover and run an inventory of every asset attached to the corporate network. Ensure peak performance and productivity with a clear tracking process and refresh policy.
Compliance and Risk Management – With IoT and other advancements in tech, it’s critical that organizations can conduct an audit of all devices to ensure data security. Speaking of audits, you’ll need a good software asset management tool to help you know your current software license position.
Cost Management and Fiscal Accountability –An automated system that updates and populates the database of when a new asset purchase order is opened, when an asset has generated too many trouble calls, or which vendors’ licenses require more scrutiny—and one that helps you manage and track all digital assets – is your ticket to cost control.
Business Scalability and the Cloud – Get insights before expanding, such as what assets can be repurposed or refreshed, what apps you’ll need, etc. Cloud apps are now an integral part of any business scaling up; your ability to automate processes and easily update inventory and service desk requests is essential to supporting any scaling upward.
End-User Experience – Give users the experience they deserve by establishing set hardware refresh dates and using automation to quickly complete requests and handle service tickets.

Join our upcoming webinar where IT pros will discuss their 2019 predictions.

As for other predictions for asset managers, the experts at International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers have these predictions to offer:

Contract management will become a new emphasis for IT Asset Managers
Strong focus on cybersecurity will continue
ITAM and ITSM will continue to blend

Going further in-depth, Martin Thompson at the ITAM Review suggests asset managers consider these points when approaching ITAM initiatives in 2019:

ITAM is growing in seniority and influence, maintaining organizational commitment remains a major challenge for worldwide ITAM functions.
Smart management of IT assets is now a company issue - not just an IT issue. This is due to many more buyers of IT coming from outside the IT department.
ITAM departments are maturing. Once an administrative stock keeping function, the leading ITAM departments around the world are strategic advisories, helping leaders make smarter decisions.
Organizational commitment remains a major challenge for ITAM professionals; organizational commitment (establishing and maintaining a mandate, getting buy-in and securing budget) will be their biggest challenge in the next five years.
Cloud usage has tipped over from small-scale experiments to a major unmanaged beast, one that is yet to be tamed for an increasing number of organizations. Cloud is less about license compliance and more about cost management, with unnecessary or over-provisioned resources costing organizations money every second.
As we move into the 2020s, the ITAM function faces the issues of both increasing environment complexity and an increasing number of stakeholders to engage with, i.e. the CMO buying turnkey cloud based solutions such as customer relationship management software.
ITAM’s new role is helping the business embrace these new technologies as fast as possible whilst also providing the necessary guardrails to ensure IT assets, and budgets, are managed. Data sovereignty, user management and cost management become the new headaches.

Here are a few more predictions on the future of IT:

By 2020, overwhelming user demand (due to consumer technology experiences) will be pushing IT into introducing multiple conversational AI / virtual assistants in the workplace. This will manifest as new self-service interfaces between users and service delivery functions.
By 2021, successful IT organizations will be automating IT operations across traditionally separated IT silos—spread across Cloud and Premises as appropriate. Companies that continue to operate non-unified IT ops silos will be losing in their markets to their automated competitors.
By 2022, large enterprises will still depend on at least 50 line of business Win32 applications.
By the year 2028, 95% of all IT tasks and business processes performed manually today will be fully automated.
By 2020, Microsoft will be the largest AV vendor in the market. It will have over 50% of that market and will be recognized as the trusted AV vendor.
2019 will be the year of panic to migrate devices to Windows 10. Approximately 100% of companies will have significant projects to complete or mostly complete this migration.
In 2020, companies who are unable to move away from Windows 7 and unwilling to pay for extended support from Microsoft will be exposed to critical vulnerabilities that will leave them exposed to significant risk, with limited means to mitigate the vulnerabilities.

Check out the rest of our predictions for IT asset management and beyond. Click below to download our white paper loaded with insights from Ivanti’s expert IT Fortunetellers.

You Might Like Holding a Clipboard, but Asset Dashboards Are Way Cooler (and Automated)

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 23:22:25 Z

Recently, I moved from California to Georgia. The moving company came, marked all my belongings with green stickers, and then gave me a long, five-page list that documented all the items they had packed.

While moving into our new home, I was equipped with a clipboard and eagerly tried marking off every item unloaded from the moving truck. Everything was going accordingly, but then I ran into some issues. The movers were beginning to remove items off the truck faster than I could mark them off my list. Something had to change. Rather than me having to keep a watchful eye on the truck, the movers agreed to shout each green sticker number of the item currently being moved off the truck.

For a while, all went great. I kept marking off furniture, boxes, and dubious items listed as “duffle bag 10.” Then, the movers carried a mattress upstairs while I was occupied in another room downstairs. They called, “Number 101!”, and I marked it off. According to my list, green sticker number 101 was a box full of kitchen tools. Fast forward twenty minutes, and the movers shouted again, “Number 101!” I looked at my list. Hadn’t I had already marked that number off? Weird.

Finally, everything had been unloaded and I had checked every item off my list. But, number 101 still irked me, especially since the final item off the truck was our mattress. I went to investigate and spotted a very nice, brand-new mattress in one of the upstairs bedrooms; however, it wasn’t ours. The moving company had delivered everything of ours, but they had also included another family’s new mattress—a large, though somewhat comical oversight.

IT Asset Management – Drop the Clipboard and Move to Dashboards

Tracking my household belongings and ensuring everything was in its desired spot was chaotic.. It’s therefore hard to imagine how IT organizations—with countless hardware and software assets—do it every day. They must maintain multiple users, disparate asset locations, a myriad of devices, , etc. Yes, barcode or RFID tags could have helped my home move, and plus, I would have loved scanning every item like you see soon-to-be brides or expecting mothers do with registry items. But I’m digressing.

According to Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 25% of organizations still use spreadsheets for their asset management initiatives. And based on recent discussions, I think this number might be higher. If your organization is currently tracking their assets on clipboards, spreadsheets, or some other rudimentary tracking form, then it’s time to stop.

Do yourself a favor and make 2019 your year by finding an IT Asset Management solution that can make your life much easier. With an effective strategy, you can know what you have in your IT environment at all times, link your contracts to your hardware and software, and establish an effective license position for your key software vendors to defend audits at any time. Learn how to proactively manage your hardware so that device failures don’t lead to downtime.

We know where you can start. Explore our free resources today, and make 2019 your year for IT Asset Management, finally ditching those spreadsheets and the surplus hardware and software that’s weighing you down.

ITAM and Endpoint Security: You Can’t Manage, Secure, and Effectively Defend Against What You Don’t Know You Have

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 21:44:29 Z

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is inextricably linked to endpoint security. In fact, as shown below, the first two of the Center for Internet Security’s Top 5 Critical Security Controls emphasize just how crucial it is to understand what devices you have and what software is running on them. These controls represent the global standard and recognized best practices for securing IT systems and data against the most pervasive attacks:

As Brian Hoskins, Director of Service Management at NCSI, declared in our recent State of the Union ITAM Virtual Leadership Summit, “What you know you have, you can manage; what you don’t know you have, manages you.”

Watch ITAM and Security video segment from the leadership summit with NCSI’s Brian Hoskins and Ivanti’s Phil Merson, Director and ITAM Specialist.

And this rings even more true when it comes to security. What you don’t know you have, you can’t really secure effectively nor defend against.

“Ghost” Assets: 30% of IT Fixed Assets

Thirty-percent of hardware assets are stolen, missing, lost, or have otherwise “ghosted.”¹ That’s quite a substantial percentage and poses significant security risk.

What’s happened to these devices? Are they even still in the organization? Has critical company data left the building—literally? Many organizations still use spreadsheets, purchase orders, or simple network discovery tools to track their assets. Keeping tabs on hardware with these traditional methods is an administrative nightmare. IT assets are assigned, reassigned, and moved from one location to another depending on business dynamics.

But it’s not just the tool side of things that’s lacking; more important, the process is missing. Fifty-six percent of organizations admit that they are only verifying their asset locations once a year, and 10 to 15 percent of them only track their asset location every five years.² Wow, let that sink in. A lot can happen in five years. For me personally, it’s three kids later; relocating from Europe to the U.S.; laptop, phone changes, and application upgrades; and a lot more.

Knowing what assets you have and where they reside, tracking regulatory compliance, and visibility into cost of ownership are just the tip of your management iceberg.

Hardware Failure Causes 53% of All Data Loss and System Downtime³

If you knew what you have and managed it proactively, you could patch your systems and fully integrate them into your security processes to help avoid security attacks. But again, you can’t protect what you don't know exists.

Making ITAM a key process of your endpoint security efforts will help you:

Discover and inventory all software and hardware in your organization
Detect new devices as they come into the organization
Understand what operating systems are running on your devices, security requirements, and applications that are installed on them

Only then you can really monitor for security breaches and report on anything suspicious and out of security policy.

Or, as Gartner stated at its recent IT Sourcing, Procurement, Vendor, and Asset Management Summit:

Locate and identify each asset when it connects
Authenticate each asset to assure it should connect
Authorize the user to determine if they should connect

Spreadsheets Don’t Work

Still think you can get by with spreadsheets? Think again. According to Gartner, less than 10 percent of new devices connecting to corporate networks will be manageable by traditional methods by 2020.⁴ In most instances, organizations find more things with an automated ITAM solution than they knew they had.

A recent Gartner client inquiry showed a whopping 60 percent more devices were discovered than were documented.⁴ Let that sink in—60 percent more. This could be authorized hardware that you spent money on you actually didn’t need to. Or, worse, it could be unauthorized devices entering your organization posing significant security risk. ITAM and endpoint security tools need to work together to understand what unauthorized hardware and software is trying to connect and to keep unauthorized software from executing to effectively protect your organization.

Don’t just purchase and forget. You need to manage your assets effectively across their lifecycle. You need to know what’s going on with your devices, what’s running on them, what’s happening with them, and which users have them. This is important with normal corporate devices, but even more so with BYOD and IoT devices making their way into the organization.

Offboarding: 50% of Former Employees Still Have Access to Corporate Applications⁵

When employees are hired, they need the appropriate hardware and software to be productive. However, many organizations may not realize the importance of properly retiring and disposing of hardware and software assets once an employee leaves or a device reaches its end of life.

When disposing of hardware assets, you must take precautions to avoid loss of confidential data from security breaches. Not only do organizations run high security risks, they could also incur substantial costs on the missing hardware that former employees take with them—and the software on those devices.

A survey of 329 organizations conducted by Intel and the Ponemon Institute revealed that collectively these enterprises had lost more than 86,000 laptops over the course of one year, costing an astounding $2.1 billion,⁶ which averages to $6.4 million per business. The price of the actual laptop may seem high, but in reality it’s the least expensive cost involved. Data breaches, lost productivity, and regulatory fines far exceed the base price of a computer.

There are definitely other reasons why it makes sense to closely link and align your IT Asset Management and endpoint security efforts, but gaining visibility into what you have is a good first step.

Take a few minutes to learn more about IT Asset Management solutions from Ivanti, where you can also request a free demo.

M. Day and S. Talbot, "Data Validation the Best Practice for Data Quality in Fixed Asset Management," (White Paper) Asset Management Resources
http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/EY_Navigating_through_the_complexities_of_the_fixed_asset_management_function/$FILE/EY-navigating-through-the-complexities-of-the-fixed-asset-management-function.pdf
http://www.infostor.com/backup-and_recovery/disaster-recovery/data-loss-and-downtime-costing-enterprises-1.7-trillion-a-year-survey.html
Gartner IT Sourcing, Procurement, Vendor & Asset Management Summit 2018: Discovery, Security, Management and Disposal: The Lifecycle of Hardware Assets in the Enterprise
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/50--of-ex-employees-still-have-access-to-corporate-applications/d/d-id/1329370?_mc=RSS_DR_EDT
http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/lost-laptops-cost-$18-billion-per-year/d/d-id/1097314?

Mareike Fondufe is a product marketing manager at Ivanti focusing on IT Asset Management solutions.

Paying Too Much for Enterprise Software? Use Our IT Asset Management Calculator!

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 20:17:28 Z

Whether it’s fear of software audits, license complexity, or lack of accurate tracking – chances are you’re spending way too much for the enterprise software for your organization without IT asset management practices.

Software makes up a large chunk of an organization’s annual IT Budget. Forrester estimates that 21.5 percent of an organization’s overall budget is swallowed up by software spendⁱ. With the constant imperative to reduce costs, IT asset managers should not overlook opportunities to optimize their software spend.

So how big is the savings potential? Well, according to IAITAM - an effective IT asset management program can cut software costs by as much as 25% - 50%. Yes, some organizations are cutting spend in half thanks to IT asset management processes. ITAM also provides visibility into how many software titles they have, whether they’re licensed correctly, and whether they’re spending on licenses they’re not even using.

According to Gartner research, organizations that improve their Software Asset Management license optimization capabilities typically report up to 30%ⁱⁱ software spending reductions within one year. Gartner research indicates that 90%ⁱⁱ of organizations could benefit from software license optimizations. These savings are just too large to ignore.

Determining how much you can save on software isn’t always easy. That’s where the Ivanti ITAM Savings Calculator can help.

Answer three quick questions to see your software savings potential:

What’s your annual IT budget?
What’s your annual software spend?
How many audits have you experienced in the last year?

With those three pieces of information, our ITAM Savings Calculator can give you an overview of your potential savings. Please note these are saving estimates. Your actual savings will vary depending on your size of organization, license types, devices running the software, IT and audit resources, etc.

A sample savings estimate

Let’s see the math in action. For the purpose of this blog, we’ll crunch the numbers for a sample organization with the following statistics:

An annual IT budget of $500 million per year
A 21.5% spend on software, so about $107.5 million per year
They’ve experienced two audits in the last year

Most organizations realize that they could incur risks and fines by failing to manage their software assets efficiently, however, many do not understand that they are missing out on significant cost savings. Studies have shown that properly managing software can lead to as much as 30% savings by driving out hidden inefficiencies from over-licensing applications or harvesting and reclaiming unused software.

These are real cost savings. The combination of mitigating significant risk and realizing substantial savings provides organizations with a major opportunity to positively affect their business operations and bottom line. So again, here’s the calculation:

Software Optimization savings = 30% SAM savings x software spend

Based on the above, our sample organization could potentially save $32.25 million when they optimize their software usage with IT Asset Management tools.

Audit Costs

On average, 68% of organizations can expect at least one software audit request in the next 12 months. Adding to that, 52% of organizations say their software has been audited multiple times.ⁱⁱⁱ

To combat the possible financial and reputational damage, 76% of organizations over-license and purchase more software than they use simply to avoid a software audit. Research reveals organizations usually over-license by as much as 30%, leading to what the industry calls ‘shelfware’.

This approach to over-licensing can result in significant overspend and still may not have the desired effect of reducing audits. As more software publishers move their customers to SaaS or cloud licensing models, audit activity has increased. Additionally, anytime there is a merger and acquisition, this increases audit risk because vendors recognize the business disruption creates an audit opportunity.

When factoring in the amount of time it takes to respond to an audit, which ITAM Review estimates is 7.13 months, the value proposition of an IT Asset Management program can usually be achieved within the first year.

Analyst Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) states that the average organization spends 30 hours reconciling asset inventory data and an additional 30 hours collecting asset entitlement data for a major audit. This becomes a huge distraction and waste of time for teams that have to drop projects to respond quickly to audits. Based on this research, we’ve calculated the following:

Cost of audit = [number of audits] x ([average hourly wage of IT Tech x average hours it takes to prepare for an audit] + [average true-up cost for license compliance])

The above works based on the following assumptions:

An average audit consumes 194.15 hours of IT department time
The average hourly wage of FTE (IT Tech) is $50/hour
The average audit true-up cost for companies with $50 million in annual revenue is $263K; for companies with about $4 billion in revenue, it’s about $1.6 million

When we plug in those figures, you get:

Cost of Audit = 2 x (($50 x 194.15 hours) + $263,000) = $545,415

We believe this estimate to be on the low end of what the average audit might actually cost. This figure assumes that just one technician is involved in the preparation of the audit. Typically, an audit will involve multiple resources from technicians, operations, all the way through to legal and finance. Also, many vendors will insist on deploying their own tools. This can be very costly from a resource standpoint as well as very intrusive.

The potential savings are too large to miss out on!

Adding the software optimization savings and audit costs together, our sample organization can potentially save $32.8 million with an efficient IT Asset Management program. To get an estimate of what your organization might be able to save, click on the button below.

IT Asset Management from Ivanti

Taking advantage of software usage data to harvest unused applications can lead to additional savings and cost avoidance. Reclaiming unused software on client devices and reducing virtual machine sprawl is often referred to as ‘low hanging fruit’ because they are easy first steps to begin optimizing the software portfolio. These areas for potential savings are just the beginning for many organizations.

Ivanti’s IT asset management approach helps companies plot a strategic roadmap that begins with discovering what they have and how to achieve these tactical and strategic savings. After companies have solved the audit problem, they can begin focusing on hardware asset management or collaborating with other IT domains to ensure security of their devices or manage asset lifecycles to remove risk from technical debt.

According to IAITAM, “ITAM provides the support to manage vendors and contracts, and cut costs by as much as 25 to 50%.” Ivanti’s ability to comprehensively manage all types of assets, contracts, and vendors uniquely positions organizations to achieve these cost saving opportunities by monitoring vendor performance against contracts and service levels, and using this data when renegotiating contracts.

The return on investment from a lifecycle approach to managing IT assets can have a significant impact on risk reduction, which is difficult to quantify until after a major incident has occurred. IT Asset Management is an insurance policy designed to mitigate that risk. And it’s much more effective than over-buying from all of your software publishers.

[i] Forrester: The Global Tech Market Outlook for 2018 to 2019

[ii] Gartner: Toolkit: Evaluate Software Asset Management Savings with SAM Tool Justification Calculator, G00303174

[iii] Survey of 250 IT decision-makers conducted by Vanson Bourne in the UK, USA and France in November 2012